What are the gains from trade today compared to those in the globalisation hundred years ago? To answer this question I rely on Krugman's (1980) idea that consumers value growing import variety, and very granular German product-level data from the first globalisation (ahead of World War I), and...

Historical estimates of workers' earnings suffer from the fundamental problem that annual incomes are inferred from day wages without knowing the length of the working year. This uncertainty raises doubts about core growth theories that rely on existing income estimates to explain the origins of...

This paper investigates the relationship between the capital share in national income and personal income inequality over the long run. Using a new historical cross-country database on capital shares in 19 countries and data from the World Wealth and Income Database, we find strong long-run...

This paper presents our data-base on world trade from 1800 to 1938. We have collected or estimated series of imports and exports, at current and constant (1913) prices and at current and at constant (1913) borders, for 149 polities. After a short review of the available series, we describe the...

I provide the first annual time series of coin and money supply estimates for about six hundred years of English history. I propose two main estimation methods. The first, which I call the 'direct method', is used to measure the value of government-provided, legal-tender coin supply only....

Most research on the history of inequality in pre-industrial economies has focused on either wealth or income. Characterizing the distribution of wealth (resp., income) is problematic owing to insufficient information about the distribution's low (resp., high) end. Because the sources and...

This paper provides a simplified method of exploring the geographical limits of a knowledge shock over the long run. Using a geographically decomposable distanceweighed sum of world GDPs by county, differences in differences regression analysis shows that a new university will not only have a...

This paper calculates indicators of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA) for 17 British manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1890, and 1900. The resulting indicators show that the late-Victorian 'workshop of the world' was at a marked...

This paper presents the first estimate to date of the anual output of Portugal's agriculture between 1500 and 1850. It adopts the well-known indirect approach, which uses a consumption function for agricultural products. Prices and wages for this come from a recently created data base. It also...

Using the Ensenada Cadastre, a unique database on Castilian households circa 1750, we measure the effect of human capital on the structure of male labor earnings. Human capital is proxied by individual indicators of basic skills (literacy and numeracy) and of occupational skills. We employ a...